September 11, 2017

“Above all else, show the data” says Edwarde Tufte. He’s the data visualization expert who promotes a high data-ink ratio in data visualizations. He describes data-ink as “the non-erasable core of a graphic”. In other words, avoid chartjunk.

SQL Junk

I buy that. Less is More. And we can apply that idea to SQL. If SQL is going to be maintained by a human, it’s best to use a style that is easy on the reader. There’s a lot of syntax in SQL that is redundant. By keeping only the non-erasable syntax in SQL statements, the SQL gets easier to understand and maintain.

Square Brackets

I know I’m not the only one who thinks so. I was watching Kendra Little’s presentation SSMS Shortcuts & Secrets. When someone asked whether there was a shortcut for removing brackets. There isn’t. Most people search and replace “[” with “” and then do the same thing with “]”. Kendra wondered if there was a regular expression that allowed a user to do both. There is, but it’s awkward because brackets need to be escaped: [\[\]] (which is only slightly easier to remember than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

SQL Junk in SSMS Generated Scripts

SSMS’s scripting engine is great at taking an object like a table and giving you a CREATE statement that will perfectly recreate what you need. But it’s a huge contributor of SQL Junk. I’ve seen so much SSMS-generated SQL get checked in to repositories that the style is assumed to be a best practice.

Here’s something that shows just how much SQL Junk can be removed. I think the resulting SQL is so much more clear and so much easier to maintain.